What Fate Does Not Say
by death on plastic wings
Summary: When Artie Abrams and Tina Cohen-Chang leave Lima, Ohio to go to college, they don't expect to see each other again. But fate is funny like that, and four years later when they bump into each other, they're two different people. Is there still a spark?
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: Hi. Jumping on the future fic bandwagon here. The first two chapters are a sort of segue, a (well at least I tried to be) brief overview of their lives since leaving Lima and an illustration of the more important points. Written in their own words, alternating with each chapter between Tina and Artie. I have the first two chapters written up and am starting on the third, though I suspect no one will really be interested until they meet up again (Which will happen in the third chapter) I figured there was no harm in putting this up early. Enjoy!**

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><strong>(Disclaimer: I don't own Glee.)<strong>

The train to New York City was empty, or at least my compartment was. Whenever we stopped I could hear the faint sound of commuters through the doors, but no one encroached on my territory. It had been unseasonably chilly for late august, and all of the other cars were at least ten degrees warmer than this one, whether by faulty technology or unseen holes, and other people walked through, looking for warmer quarters. I just snuggled deeper into my giant sweatshirt, deeper into the worn pleather seats, and tried to disappear.

Now would be a great time to reflect on the last year and a half of my life, I though bitterly to myself. That's what people did in stories, or movies. Exposition, I remembered from a far off English class back before all I'd wanted to do was get the hell out of Lima. I'd never understood why exposition was so important. Anyway, this is a story about starting over, not dwelling on the past. I left Lima and severed all ties to the world. I wasn't TTTTina C, who first auditioned for Glee club because her best friend told her he would if she did. I wasn't Tina Cohen-Chang, the slightly more confident goth girl who could never seem to finish her solos. I wasn't even Tina, the girl who graduated the same way she'd started school, lost in a crowd of people who all looked the same to her.

I was someone else, even more lost. Anything that had defined me in high school was stripped away, from the colorful streaks in my hair to the proto-gothy persona I'd thrown up like a shield. I was scrubbed clean, dressed in demure colors and ready to pretend I was someone else.

And the train rumbled on, through stop after stop, and I wondered to myself if this was all just a colossal mistake.

I passed the first six months of college in anonymity. I never even met my roommate. All I got was a note on her pillow, saying she was staying with a friend in the East Village and I could do whatever the fuck I wanted with the room. For some reason, That made me want to throw something at the wall. The dent's probably still there. I made good use of her side of the room, don't worry. I worked on a theatre production a girl named Amy who lived on my floor put on, in some cramped black box theatre that seated around twenty people on a good day. I wasn't in it, of course, even though she asked me to audition. I made myself busy painting the set, kneeling on the floor with a bucket of black paint until the knees of my jeans were worn out and I could barely see the faded blue denim under the tar thick splotches. The set looked awesome, and I buried the jeans in my closet and forgot about them.

I hunted for jobs wherever I could find them, but my first real good job came around the six month mark when an alt rag picked me up to push pencils and study under the Editor in chief, with a promise to move up if I showed potential. It was clutching the envelope full of cash that was my first paycheck and hurrying out the door of the little ATM down the block from my new office that my real college experience began. I would have missed it, but there was something that sparkled in the window of the little shop across the street that caught my eye, and before I knew what I was doing I was standing at the counter, clutching a bottle of bright lavender dye to my chest while the cashier rang up my other purchases.

All the way back to my dorm, I wondered what had possessed me, whether I'd done something smart, what I was _thinking_, but as soon as I was pinning my hair up in layers in the bathroom, I knew. Later, falling asleep on a pillow that would never quite recover from the purple tinted water seeping into it, I felt whole for the first time since I'd arrived.

The next day, dressed in the paintstained jeans I'd forgotten about months ago and a few choice black articles I'd managed to scrimp, I was kneeling on the floor of my closet, fishing through the various debris to be found there. It was a half-forgotten dream, the day I'd packed, and the only thing that I remembered was the end, staring down at the overstuffed bags and needing something to remind me of who I was. There! In the back of the closet where I'd thrown them in anger, or shame, were my favorite pair of battered black combat boots. "Success."

I definitely garnered a few stares that day as I went through my classes. It felt weird, I doubted anyone had even known my name before that day, but now, they definitely noticed me. Standing in the cavernous cafeteria, about to pay for my food, I felt hair brush against my shoulder. Turning around I caught a flash of deep purple hair. Someone was leaning on my shoulder, creamy dark hands fiddling with my hair and what I assumed was a scrap of their own.

I turned farther. There was a boy (at least I was pretty sure it was a boy, although he was so androgynous I was going based on the lack of a chest area at that point) standing behind, me, grinning mischievously through a waterfall of royal purple hair. "Your hair is gorgeous. Come sit with us." Without waiting for me to answer, he grabbed my wrist in one hand and my tray of food in the other and pulled me over towards a table in the back.

Three other people were slumped around it, a tall boy with white blond hair pulled into a messy ponytail that cascaded down his back, a tiny girl with fluffy bright green hair, and a dark haired girl who stood and pulled me into a hug as soon as I'd set my tray down next to her. "I'm Maya. That was Jazz." She nodded her head over to the boy, who had plunked down across from me, still grinning like a jackal. "He's been eyeing your hair from across the room for ten minutes." They laughed, the easy laugh of people who were entirely comfortable with each other. I sunk deeper into my seat.

"So, what's your name?"

"T-Tina." Maya laughed. "Don't look like that, Tina. We're not going to bite you. Contrary to popular belief, we're not vampires." She paused and considered. "I'm not a vampire. Ness is sometimes but only when she wants your attention." The green haired girl crossed her arms. "We prefer the term 'Nosferatu', thank you very much. Vampire has a connotation to be avoided in modern society." I laughed. "You're telling me. My principal was convinced I was a vampire in high school." A round of laughs went up around the table, and for the first time since graduation I felt like here was somewhere I might belong. Ness looked over at me. "You don't look too much like a vampire today." I shrugged. "That was then. I got rid of my she-demon wardrobe after graduation." I looked down at my lap. "I thought I didn't want it anymore."

"Well if you want the look back, there's this great place in SoHo... Ooh or that one in the East Village-"

"Yes! And what about that little strip of shops we found way down by..."

"Or that Trashion market that's only open on- Hey That's this weekend!"

"Tina! Shopping trip!" Ness crowed. "Maya and I know everywhere there is to know to get awesome clothes on a tight budget. It will be grand!" She raised her arms theatrically. Maya nodded. "It'll be fun. As long as you want to come, of course." She looked up at me expectantly, soft dark eyes questioning. How could I refuse? "Sure. It's time I made some friends around here." Ness cheered, and the blond boy, who's name I would later learn was Jake, launched into a discussion about a new used record store that had popped up around the corner from his place, and I just laughed along, and felt something, camaraderie, stirring in my chest. Friends.

That Sunday morning I was awoken by loud rapping on my door. "Tina? I know you're in there. It's Maya and Ness. Are you awake?" There was sounds of a scuffle, and then someone banging hard enough on my door I was afraid it might break. "TINA. THIS IS NESS, AKA YOUR WAKEUP CALL. BITCH, GET YOUR ASS OVER TO THIS DOOR AND LET US IN BEFORE I AM FORCED TO BREAK IT DOWN." I scrambled out of bed, as fast as someone who has just been woken up can scramble, and opened the door. "Fuck you." Ness beamed at me. "Fuck you too. Are you ready to go?" I growled at her and pulled a sweatshirt over the tank-and-sweats combo I'd fallen asleep in. Ness gave a disapproving cluck at my outfit, but Maya smiled a rich, warm smile and hooked her elbow in mine. "Come on, sugar. We've got miles to go before we drop."

We spent the day gallivanting from one shop to another, trying on much more than we even considered buying. Still, when twilight had almost fallen and we were returning to my place, I had spent more than I had since I'd trashed my look, and I felt comfortable in my own skin for the first time in what felt like aeons. When we got to my room, I turned in the doorway, expecting to say goodbye, but Ness was too quick, she bounced past me and flopped down on my bed. "Mmmm. I really love what you've done with the place. It's very..." she searched for the word, "Basic. Now if it was _my _room, I'd..." She sprang up again, her seemingly boundless energy taking her around the tiny room, touching the walls and explaining her plans to me. I laughed. "If you want to do all that, you should just move in." She shrugged. "Okay. I'll bring my stuff around tomorrow." With that, she bounded out of my dorm again, not even sparing me a wave goodbye. Behind me, Maya chuckled. I jumped, startled. I'd almost forgotten she was there. "She's always like that. It takes some getting used to, but once you do... she's great." She sat down lightly on my bed, next to me, arm brushing mine, with that same slow sweet smile that made anyone want to melt. At least, I hoped it was anyone. Falling in love with my best friend (again), would do me no good at all. And yet...

I brushed off the feeling, grinning back at her. "Yeah. I think I can see it, already. You... all of you, are great."

"Do you want to grab a bite to eat? I'll buy." She quirked an eyebrow. "Uh... sure."

"Great."

After that, Maya and I tried to find a new inexpensive hole in the wall place every week, and I adjusted to life with a roomie. As it turned out, this was an easy feat. Most of Ness's classes started somewhere around sunset, and after that she had the late shift as a deejay at some club or another. She stumbled into her pillow as I was brushing my teeth, and bumped shoulders with me in the doorway as I dragged my feet home, usually after clocking in extra hours at the magazine office, filing paperwork until my head spun.

I discovered, again, the benefits of friendship, sitting head to head with Jake in the library discussing the effects of Christian rock on atheists or spending hours watching and learning from Jazz, who's flew faster and more fluidly than anyone I'd ever met. He was better than my instructors, for sure. Ness and I would wander the city aimlessly, taking silly pictures of each other dancing on fountains or hiding in the bushes in central park, or ducking into tiny mysterious places that we would manage to find only once, and never again, regardless of how long we looked. I spent hours with Maya, she was a native New Yorker who knew the ins and outs of the place better than anyone else. She'd drag me all the way out to Brooklyn to show me a coffee shop that had the best hot chocolate I'd ever tasted, or take me to SoHo to a restaurant where the tables were chalkboards and they projected Charlie Chaplain films on the walls. I barely left the city during the summer break, apart from two weeks where I went home to help my parents move across town, I was invited to stay with Maya in the apartment she shared with her mother, a kind, aging Latina woman who spoke English fast and Spanish faster, and who treated me like a daughter. When the school year started up again, I moved back into my dorms. Like my mother, Marisol drove me crazy.

A few weeks before Christmas break, Amy asked me to paint another set. Poised at the top of a ladder marking out the finer details of a huge night club sign, I took a hard fall, ending up at home on bed rest with my entire right leg up in a cast, bored out of my mind. While my friends made plans for Christmas parties and shopped for presents, I watched Buffy re-runs and wondered if I'd be able to dance in time for the final show and if this would affect my grade. I was about to shoot myself to get it over with when one night a light tapping sounded on my window. Widening my eyes, I looked outside, and grinned when I saw Maya, illuminated from behind by a softly glowing streetlight, leaning against the fire escape. Fumbling with the latch, I opened the window and she climbed in like a cat, discarding her heavy coat and plopping down beside me. "I thought you might want the company."

We spent every night together, curled up on my bed with my laptop propped up between us, celebrating ever bit of recovery, when it was announced I was allowed to do more than hobble from bed to bathroom and back, and when the cast was changed, the hairline fracture on my thigh deemed healed enough to go without, provided I went easy on it, she asked me if I wanted to come to the New Years Eve party at Ness's club and I said, in that same timid voice I always used with her, "Um... Sure."

Maya looked stunning, on New Years Eve, draped in a glittering floor length black dress that hugged her curves. She swept me out to a table where the rest of our friends, sans Ness, were lounging, party snacks and glasses of champagne in hand. I sat with them, as the night spun on, laughing about nothing, glad more than anything to be out of the house. As the midnight hour approached, Maya tugged on my arm, leading me out to the dance floor, despite my feeble protests, and we swayed together until the clock struck twelve. She tipper her forehead against mine and whispered "make a wish." before leaning closer and touching her lips to mine.

Maya and I were happy. She was affectionate, not caring if we garnered stares cuddling in coffee shops and hustling down the street arm in arm, giggling like schoolgirls. She was soft, and cuddling with her, her curves, her warm arms, was bliss. But there was the part, before, or after the cuddling, where we would do... other things. I loved Maya, but there are some things I would not do. It made her sad. What I would do was with great hesitation. I loved the soft curves of a woman, and the supple lips, but beyond that... there were things I could not bring myself to enjoy.

We ended the relationship on a good note, six months, give or take, after it had begun. We were then in the summer of our third year, and everything seemed to be changing. Ness moved in and out of Jake's apartment like clockwork, sometimes enlisting my help carrying boxes at insane hours of the morning. I dropped half of my classes and changed my major from dance to journalism. The magazine fired me. I changed it back. I found work again, at another magazine that promised more hours and better work after college, if I stayed on that long. I changed my major once more. I almost didn't pass the year because of it, but ended on a high note when my current boyfriend, Jackson, invited me on a cruise over the summer with his family. Even though we spent the second half of it fighting and I nearly threw his racist father off of the ship on more than one occasion, I came back my final year tanner and ready for action.

Halfway through the year when Ness and I were discussing our plans for the future, she mentioned "Well, if you... wouldn't mind continuing to live with me, you know, splitting the rent's cheaper and I was thinking... Well, I saw... there's this apartment on the same street as Jake's and the rent's cheap and..." we moved in the next week, figuring that hitting while the market was hot seemed like a good idea, and with a couple extra shifts on both our ends, we managed to graduate without losing the apartment.

My work pulled through and they gave me a deal, I could write the hard hitting articles, if I would also take up reviewing clubs and bars on the side. I accepted. Ness was still deejaying from dusk 'til dawn, with added potential, a scout had picked her up for some punk modeling gig and she was "90% sure it wasn't a scam." Every other night, I got dolled up and hit the scene, scoping out all the best new places I heard about, usually from Ness or Jake or Jazz, who would randomly appear in my life with a different exotic lover and far fetched plan to run away together.

When I heard about Splat! and its grand opening, it seemed like the perfect place to scope out, and maybe if I was lucky, I could get the review out before anyone else had the same idea. It was the perfect opportunity. Little did I know what I would find there. Or, rather, who.

But first, let him tell you his part of the story. I'm sure you're dying to know.


	2. Chapter 2

**I'm not making any promises about updating because it's pretty clear that I suck at it but I am tired of this being in my folder so here it is I do not have the next chapter written I don't know if I ever will I am sorry.**

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><p><p>

When I started college, I did not expect to have friends. I opted for a small local college. I'd gotten scholarships to some pretty prestigious names but I wasn't quite ready to abandon my home completely, and judging by the half crazy look in my mother's eyes as she helped me pack and told me about how to live on my own and how she'd visit every weekend if she could manage, I thought I'd made the right decision. The campus was small, but accessible, out in the middle of nowhere and then some, but it had wifi and decent arts and tech programs so who was I to complain.

The first month passed in a haze of getting situated and rushing to and from classes and looking for a job, which I found at a bookstore in the one-bar town that was the only thing for miles around the campus. I was on a first name basis with a couple guys from a few classes and had spent a few afternoons chatting up the other college student employed at the bookstore, who was a cordial fellow named Jim who always seemed melancholy about something or another. But there was nothing substantial in the way of friendship, except...

There was this girl. I swear to god every time I looked up it was like she had just looked away from me. I mean there were only like eleven people in the lecture hall in the one class we shared, but at the time all I could think about was that I wished she would stop staring. One day, in the last ten minutes of a class, Prof. Steiner invited us down to sit in a circle in front of him and this girl gave me this quizzical look and then slowly sat down next to me. He told us to introduce ourselves, something we had never done despite the class's size.

This girl, wiry, all elbows, a puff of ginger hair sticking out of this giant striped hat she had on and so many freckles that she looked like someone just squirted her with a bottle full of mud, introduced herself as Cerulean Alexandria Myer. Everyone looked at her, part "is she for real?" part "oh man, that's one crazy hippie chick right there." and then the Prof had to go get something he wanted to set up, and we were just stuck there sitting on the platform waiting and this girl, Cerulean, would not stop looking at me, leaning slightly away from me like she was afraid I would get something on her.

"It's not contagious, you know." I finally muttered to her. She looked up at me, bemused. "Huh?" "It's not contagious. The nerd or the paraplegia or whatever else you think is gonna rub off on you. You don't have to do that." She looked down at her position, than back up at me, and cracked a shy, buck-toothed smile. "Oh. Sorry." She corrected herself, sitting with her arms around her knees in front of me. "No offense meant. Quite the opposite in fact, I didn't want to infringe on your..." she stopped, trying to reign in her train of thought. "Sorry. I... um... Hi." she laughed quietly. "Hi."

I looked her over. She was one of those naturally awkward people, every angle at odds with another. Her wrists were laden with bracelets, cloth, hemp, brightly colored woven strings intertwined and pulled down by heavy glass beads. She was barefoot, something I had neglected to notice until now, her sun browned toes covered in the highlighter orange of faded henna tattoos. "Um. Sorry. Again." she said, interrupting my thoughts. "I just..." she looked down, at her wriggling toes. Around us the other students, all nine of them, were huddled in groups of two or three, chatting lightly, while we sat in awkward silence.

"Why are you still sitting here?" I couldn't help the question. She looked surprised. "Where else would I be?" I looked up, in the general area of the others. From the group, it was pretty easy to tell who's who. On the edge of the platform, elbows propped up, smiling lazily, were the ones who took this class for the easy A they were sure it would be. There at the back were the serious students who took this class because they needed the credits to fill out their extensive curriculum. Those two were here because the guest lecturers were 'sort of famous', and they wanted to rub elbows with people who have succeeded where they were probably doomed to fail. And then there was us, bright, jangly, alive Cerulean, and me. "I guess." I shrugged. "But still. Why me?" She shrugged too, biting her lip and looking down before answering me.

"Because. I'm weird. I doodle on my feet and try to get away with knitting hats in class and I really like creative psychology and I wear too many belts at once and I was homeschooled until the tenth grade and then a bit after that, and this is my third year of college but I don't want to tell anyone that. I listen to weird music and hate shoes. They're all 'Future corporate execs who can smell freak from a mile away'." She laughed and looked tentatively up at me, almost like she was making sure I was still there, and kept going. "But you're weird too. You wear grandpa sweaters and yellow gloves that clash with everything except bees and you read and bookmarked all the material already and you doodle the ocean in the margins of your notebook and I thought that maybe if your weird and my weird were compatible... we could. You know. Be friends."

She was studying her toenails, the edges showing signs of some long lost coat of fluorescent purple paint, and the last few words were haltingly stuttered out at them. And maybe it was something in that shy smile she gave me that reminded me of a girl I'd once loved, or something in her word spewing tendencies that reminded me of myself, but even though I was pretty sure she'd just insulted my style and the fact that she knew what I had been doodling even though we were several rows away from each other might have been cause for concern, I found myself saying, "Okay. Sure."

She looked up, her eyes hopeful and that shy smile back on her face. "Cool. Then you can call me Xan." she looked around, like she was afraid someone else might get wind of this new development. "But only you. That's a friends only privilege." I had to laugh. "So you knit?" "Yeah. But don't expect me to be making you any fancy shit, k? I am strictly a scarf and hat type of girl. Maybe I'll make you a bee scarf to go with your gloves though. Maybe." She leaned against the side of my chair, her head brushing the armrest and her legs against mine. "I've never had anything that matched these gloves before. I got yellow gloves the first time because the yellow one was my favorite power ranger, and then it just became a thing."

"Impressive, Abrams. It takes a real man to admit that he liked the girl power rangers. But they totally kicked ass, so. Good choice. With the yellow and black, I would have guessed you were trying to emulate Bumblebee."

"Bumblebee was awesome. But Optimus Prime was better."

"_Blatant lies_."

After that, everything was about Xan. I don't know if it was just me, that I have some complex that requires me to revolve my life around another person, any other person, or if it was her, her bright flame and passionate insanity that drew me to her like a moth to a vibrant flame, or a planet orbiting a sun. But that was how it was. I had Xan, and I didn't need anyone else.

Xan was always in motion. There was never a time that I would look over at her and her body would be completely still. When she came calling she'd stand outside my dorm building with a hula hoop going around her waist, tossing pebbles at my window until one day she threw one too hard and left a spiderweb fracture on the glass (which never got fixed, even though I asked repeatedly) and she promised to knock like a normal person.

I was used to having only one friend, and Xan was used to having none, or at least, none that stayed for long, and together we made a pretty good friendship team. It was almost like Tina, but not quite. Xan made me laugh in the comfortable easy way that two people who have all the inside jokes together can laugh, not the gut wrenching side splitting laughter of two people who can read each other's minds, but still surprise each other with the most outrageous things. She was not as cuddly as Tina, and the questions she asked, and she asked questions everywhere, were different from Tina's, although they reminded me so strongly of her sometime I couldn't answer them. And when we curled up with bad old movies to watch again and again, it felt right. Like I'd gotten a piece of my life, that, if it was not the same puzzle piece as before, at least fit reasonably well and comfortably and made the puzzle more interesting to look at. So when she pulled herself closer and put her her face next to mine, I kissed her. And when she asked why, I said "Because you're my best friend." And when she asked if I was in the habit of kissing my best friends, I kissed her again and replied, "Actually, yes."

Xan and I didn't last very long. Part of it was timing. She was leaving college, she said, for the wild yonder and what was ahead of her. She said this, and also that she was never very good at being tied down by the system and people and she needed some space and she wasn't sure if this was what was best for us. She hugged me goodbye one unexpected morning and as I watched her go I felt the past year slide off of us like an old tarp, the lightness of barely making an impact in someone's life. And had she really made an impact in mine, I wondered. She was just a placeholder, after all.

Without Xan, it was different, in college. The first few weeks were empty, hollow without the constant of the girl I'd shared the last year and a half of my life with. I scrabbled to regain the rest of life, bits and pieces of it that had fallen out of my mind and been forgotten coming back into place. As it turned out, the rest of my life had not forgotten about me. Jim, who I'd continued to work alongside, welcomed me back to the world by inviting me to come to his "Coffee circle", and intriguing concept which boiled down to a ragtag group of people who met for overpriced coffee once a week and talked, loudly and possibly rather obnoxiously in the small campus coffee shop, about life, and everything. I became a regular, and from it branched more friends.

Caramel skinned, mocha haired Brandy, who had a deep sultry voice in the jazz club and a talent for perfectly mimicking singers when we got together with "Tough guy Sid" (who's folk guitar skills were second to none and had a voice like an ill frog) to jam and laugh and kill time when we should have been studying. Kyle, who had a funny blond beard and built machines and had lots of philosophy that was good to listen to and even better when one or both of you was drunk, and who drove a tractor because cars were all part of the system and "Hell, you can't mow a fuckin' lawn or till wheat with a car, can ya?", Jesse and Milo and Rae-Anne, who introduced me to seductive concepts like strip beer pong and parties in the cornfields that lasted until dawn, and were singlehandedly (Tripe handedly?) responsible for me almost failing one of my most important classes senior year.

When I went back to my computer (Xan had sworn against them and had been trying to wean me off of using mine) I found emails from almost all of my friends from back home, worriedly wondering why my correspondence has stopped. One name was noticeably missing, but I tried not to dwell on that, and after that there were late night skype calls from Sam and Puck sending me texts whenever he knew I'd be in class, which inevitably lead to texting battles afterwards until it was too much for my poor phone bill and we had to resort to Facebook to continue our insanity.

I can barely remember my classes, even the ones I hated, but for the most part college was good, and I'm sure in the end it was worthwhile. After all, it set in action the motions that would bring about the rest of my life, and that's something I'll always be thankful for.

In my last months of college, it had, of course, crossed my mind that when it was over, I'd need to go somewhere, and I spent long nights, online, making phone calls, until I thought I'd set up something in Cincinnati that seemed reasonably likely to work out. My friends and I talked at length about life after college, plans for the future, promising to keep in touch after we would no longer be forced together by circumstance. We had our last parties, out last coffee circles and jam sessions and philosophy under the stars, and prepared for the life that was ahead of us. Just as it seemed I was finally, completely putting Xan out of my head, she called me again a week before my graduation and told me to meet her in New York City.

Fact. I hated New York City. It's crowded and large and full of strange smells and terrifying noises. When I met her, fresh off the train, Xan blended in with the populace, her copper colored hair streaked with aquamarine, her usually bare feet stuffed into a pair of black loafers that just looked wrong on her somehow, and her bracelets still clacking and jangling as she reached around to hug me. As we left the station together, en route to her so called apartment, she told me about the band she had started, about how it'd gained some minor notoriety in the underground scene, but it could really use some male lead vocals and none of the other guys were really up to scratch.

She took me to meet them, all lounging about the overcrowded loft, Caden and Dominic, a pair of twins who look like a photograph and its negative, Caden's long blond hair pulled up in a ponytail exposing his tan neck while his brother's dark waves fell freely around his pale face. They played guitar and bass, respectively, and Xan told me in confidence she mostly took them on because they make such a lovely contrast on the stage. Bailey, the other girl, had a shaved head and studs in her cheeks and on her collarbone and a floral dress and said she didn't like using gender specific pronouns but Xan told me that that was more about her being an insufferable prick and wanting to be edgy than anything to do with gender preference. She said she would get rid of her but no one could drum like Bailey.

I joined the band even though my parents were clamoring with me to get a real job and not waste my life but I figured I'm twenty three and only live once and I'll have plenty of time to waste my time not wasting my life when I'm thirty. We played at bars and clubs and people cheered us on and there was a heady sense of excitement that I couldn't get rid of and it plus the drinking and the fans that sometimes came up to tell me how good I was made me do more than a few stupid things.

Six months later Xan had slammed all the doors in the apartment on her way out, after an altercation that had left the window panes rattling and with Bailey in tow, flipping the bird and still screaming about equality and misogynist pigs as she hit the street, and the girl who'd come home with me after the set standing bewildered in nothing but my bedsheet and probably wondering how she'd managed to get herself confused into this insane family.

I dated her for almost a month afterwards, the longest I'd managed to keep a girlfriend since Xan herself, and once Xan and Bailey were gone, we all breathed an unspoken sigh of relief and Caden and Dom (Who Xan really never gave enough credit to, they were amazing at what they did) and I scouted for new members. As luck would have it, we found Casey, who was an even better drummer than Bailey and had no piercings, in her collarbone or anywhere else, relatively easily, and she readily agreed, head of dreadlocks bobbing as she signed the sheet, because as she put it she was "Mildly homeless" and "Rent four ways seems pretty sweet" and "Drama is what keeps life together, and besides you guys let me drink out of the milk carton and everything!"

Our next bit of luck came with an email announcing that Brandy was in New York and looking for work. It took her about two seconds of convincing to join in with us and before we knew it our little group was being hailed as a hit in three different underground rags and in two months we'd lined up at least one or two shows per week, the next of which was the opening of a new up and coming club that would earn us a pretty penny. And that's when she showed up. But I'll leave that part of the story to her. She tells it better than I do.


End file.
